THE TEASE! A dollop of tasty info designed to whet your appetite for tonight’s episode of Lost, the sixth episode of this fantastic fourth season, a Juliet-centric flashback outing called ”The Other Woman.” Executive producer Carlton Cuse was gracious enough to spill the following:

”Finally! Ben’s gonna tell us who sent that damn freighter!”

Whoa! Now that’s a big-time tease for you! Thanks, Captain Cuse!

You know, wouldn’t it be a fiendish twist if we find out that the man behind the freighter is none other than… Ben himself!? That’s what reader Tom Champoux thinks. A fan of both Lost and The Usual Suspects, Doc Champoux sent me an e-mail arguing that Ben is pulling a ”Keyser Soze” — creating a fictitious big bad to further manipulate our heroes and advance his big-picture agenda. ”I think he hired the freighter folk through some Kobayashi butler,” writes Champoux, whose theory could explain the mysterious identity of Matthew Abbaddon. Regardless, he says, ”I think Ben was being honest when he told Michael at the end of season 2, ‘I’m one of the good guys.”’

After last week’s time-tripping Desmond episode, I promised you guys some more analysis of ”The Constant” due to the fact that I watched it while suffering through a crunch of flu-induced fever. As it turns out, it’s probably good we spend some more time with it, anyway, given the intensity of passion and interest that many fans continue to have in the episode, arguably the best single outing since season 1’s ”Walkabout.” And to help us understand the story’s noodle-cooking intricacies, I have some crucial insight from exec producer and ”Constant” co-writer Damon Lindelof that I think you’ll wanna know. To wit:

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO DESMOND? In ”The Constant,” Desmond became ”unstuck in time” after flying through a thundercloud crackling with strange electricity. He experienced something like time travel, though not bodily time travel; instead, his consciousness shuttled between two different time periods, Island present 2004 and Desmond’s past 1996. But here’s the tricky twist: Desmond’s Island-present mind wasn’t the one doing the time traveling. When Desmond got hit with Island magic, his consciousness got knocked off-line and was replaced by his 1996 self. It was this older Desmond consciousness that toggled between present and past throughout the episode. Once Desmond ‘96 completed the errand of getting Penny’s phone number so he could call her on Christmas Eve 2004, Desmond’s present-day mind came back online, but rebooted with the new memories created by his time-travel adventure. I know: tricky stuff. But I had the chance to run all this by Damon Lindelof — and he says this interpretation is correct.